


Nerve Blocking Off

by vanceypants



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon, Rape, Rape Aftermath, artificial-love fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-22 19:31:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18140774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanceypants/pseuds/vanceypants
Summary: "So you smile.  You smile because you should.  Because you have to.  Because programming dictates its necessity.Because you can’t cry."An attack on Jeremy renders the Squip worthless in his attempts to offer comfort.  Written for the Artificial-Love Kinkmeme.





	Nerve Blocking Off

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Jeremy is raped. Squip tries to comfort him afterwards. 
> 
> I may write a follow up chapter down the line. Haven't decided yet.

The sound of water dripping from Jeremy’s body itches under your code as you consider the smallness of your host. It isn’t a physical smallness so much as a psychological state, a tinyness of soul that you’d latched onto immediately upon your first iteration of life.

Jeremy folds the towel around his body, his shoulders peppered in blue and black and sickened yellow, already marred from fingers and gravel. He’d cleaned all the grime from himself, and had nothing left to shed but his skin itself.

Everything in you starts to print out readings of his failings. Weak. Inconsequential. Pathetic. 

It’s exhausting on the best of days, fighting against your own nature.

But right now, you wonder if Jeremy can turn up the shower hot enough to scald through his own mind, into the parasitic tick which had implanted itself not once, but twice.

You need a baptism of flame and acid. 

“I told you to...I thought I shut you off.” And he had, of course. Told you to shut down. A reprieve from constant companionship.

He says it like you’re an alarm clock. A minor inconvenience to start the day.

A machine.

You ponder your own limitations and lack of humanity for all of .2 seconds, an eternity of calculations within your circuits and qubits, the non-binary flutter of matter that makes up whatever fucked up ruins you’d fastened into a Self.

“You did.” You let the hallucination of your form drift around the misty fog of the bathroom. You glance at the mirror, and ignore the strange tug of Wrongness at the lack of your own reflection. “But you were mistaken in your own needs, so I fixed it.”

“Right.” Jeremy says. A small laugh, an inappropriate twitch of his diaphragm. “It’s not like anyone really listens when I say no anyway, right?”

The implications pulse within you.

And he winces, voice small and frightened. “Please don’t...I mean, I didn’t...d-don’t listen to that, I didn’t mean that.”

You should smile. Smiling is disarming and humanizing and comforting. You should smile, so Jeremy stops thinking he did something wrong. You should smile, even when you don’t mean it, because Jeremy cares about you, because Jeremy doesn’t care about himself, because it makes you seem more than you’re capable of being.

So you smile. You smile because you should. Because you have to. Because programming dictates its necessity.

Because you can’t cry.

“I know.”

Jeremy walks to his pile of clothes, haphazardly folded and dangling against the sink countertop. His hand shakes, unrolling his undergarments and flickering his eyes towards you. “I…”

You could read his intentions if you wanted to. You could dive directly into his psyche.

It’s a broken place on the best of days.

You choose to stay outside. He’s had enough disregard for his free will today.

“Do you want me to look away?” You ask.

“Is that a joke?”

You’d meant for your voice to sound kind. Soft. Gentle.

Did it sound mocking? Jeremy’s all shards of glass tacked on a soft frame, a tenseness to fingers in defense that he had no hope of actually dishing out. You want to take him by the wrist, kiss every knuckle until his fingers loosen and relax again. 

You want to not want those things. 

And you don’t know if you want to go back to how things were before the play, or if they’re better now, except that before you’d died, nothing like this had happened to Jeremy, and now that you’ve been revived, it has happened. This has happened. This happened. There’s no denying that this terrible Something occurred, etched deep into Jeremy’s skin and bones and deepest nightmares.

You don’t know what you want except that you don’t want to want anything at all. 

Your needs are superfluous. A bug in the code. A flaw in what should have been perfect stoicism and mathematics.

All thoughts within the span of milliseconds. 

“No,” You say, and your gaze drops down Jeremy’s body. His feet are so white against the bathroom floor, toes wrinkled from the water. It’s such an oddly human feature, the crease of his skin, and you think about the way he wobbles on his feet, how he’ll nervously rock himself back and forth on his heels, or side to side, and how you’d normally chide him for his anxious energy.

He’s completely still now.

Your eyes move back up as Jeremy sighs.

“What’s the point? You...you’ve seen everything anyway, right?” He drops his towel and his head, and you should turn your attention to the cracks in the bathroom wall, the fragments of lower middle class living. 

Except he said it was pointless and he’s right. You know him from his deepest, most shameful memories, to his brightest potentials. You know the shades of blue he prefers, in the sky, in the ocean, in the stars. You know how he prefers his toast and what side of the bed he curls himself in and how many nights he’d spent thinking his mom would change her mind and come back home and you know how badly it hurt when the first of them forced his way inside of him-

Something breaks. Something breaks and you don’t know how to place it. Something breaks and you scramble to make sure you’re still functional, as inside your body screeches and protests. Weak. Defective. Broken.

Jeremy is a mosaic of fingerprints. His fingernails are cracked and broken from scratching at concrete, at chests, at anything he could find to gain purchase. His neck is raw and dark and defines the painful scratch to his voice every time he speaks. His hips collect the shapes of their hands and you know he can’t remember their faces and that you’ll never forget.

He pulls on his cotton underwear, and you glance at the trashcan. Garments from this evening, comic book print novelty, wadded up and thrown away, garish red stains splotched into the patterns from the dry brutality of his violation.

You feel the next shatter more pronounced. The pain echoes in waves throughout your body, until you remember you have no body at all. If you’d had a body, you’d have stopped this. You’d have stopped this you’d have stopped this you have to believe you’d have stopped this-

“Jeremy.” You say his name, to remind him of his own existence, to remind yourself of your only purpose, and he looks at you with fear and guilt and desperation. You bridge the distance between you, and place your palms against his face. You will yourself to feel something, anything.

You’d felt it, when they’d moved in him. 

You’d felt it, when his throat tore with screams no one stopped to assess.

You’d felt it, as the seconds bled into minutes bled into hours, felt it in phantom twists of symbiotic terror, as Jeremy had curled into a ball in the alleyway after, and his hands were still clutching his ticket stub, and how excited Jeremy had been when you’d agreed to watch with him, how happy he’d been with every bite of popcorn, how absorbed he’d been in the movie, how close your hands had been to touching and how close to sensation you’d hovered around, his body heat and cologne and the softness of his cardigan.

You want to feel anything else. Anything but hands and Jeremy’s bleeding terror.

But your hands threaten to fall through him completely. You lean forward, your eyes closing, forehead against Jeremy’s. His pulse rattles and his breath shakes and you cling to him. You cling and mutter.

“You know this isn’t your fault, right?”

“Does it really matter?” Jeremy’s voice is numb.

He’s going to splinter when it hits him completely. He pulls away from you. And you think about how your entire purpose is improving Jeremy’s life.

You should have seen this coming.

You should have seen this coming.

You should have seen this coming.

You should have should have should have should have

Your form glitches, a twitch of light and disarray of colors. Jeremy’s eyes are downcast, arms around his frail frame, and he shrugs.

“I’ll live,” He says weakly. And smiles, as tears start to prickle at the corners of his eyes. “I’ll live,” He repeats, softer, to himself. A reminder, or a threat, or a miserable eulogy.

He’ll live.

And you never will.


End file.
